UKOUG 2008 Highlights

Tonight I returned from my first UKOUG conference. I’ve been to smaller conferences like Microsoft Technet and big ones like European Oracle Open World before, but this was without a doubt best one so far (measured by the value of content and amount of fun).

I couldn’t attend all the sessions that aroused my interest, there were simply too many of them. From those I attended, there are few I’d like to mention as highlights of the conference.

Tom Kyte and his “Best way…” was one of the most entertaining sessions and at the same time, one of the most educational. James Morle and his view of the current state of storage devices was also one of the very strong ones in both perspectives.

In the E-Business Suite (EBS) track there were at least three sessions focused on upgrading to Release 12. A very interesting high-level overview was presented by Oracle about how they upgraded their GSI (Global Single Instance). For those of you who are not familiar GSI, it is perhaps one of the largest EBS implementations out there, with 14TB of data. It consists of four node-killer RAC nodes (34GB SGA) with 64 middle tiers (reduced to 39 after upgrade to R12) servicing 85,000 Oracle employees in their daily business.

Another excellent presentation was by John Abel on deploying EBS into the public Internet environment. If you have any public middle tier, I think you might like his slides, as they makea great reference for everything you need to take care of—from the architecture down to actual configuration files and penetration tests.

I did a presentation on Autoconfig customization, which I believe is an important and too-often overlooked area of EBS maintenance. The presentation was not as broad as I’d like it to be, but 45 minutes is too few to fit in everything.

I didn’t want to overwhelm my audience with tons of slides in 12-point text as I’ve witnessed in certain sessions. But EBS is so broad and interdependent that it’s really difficult to pick a single topic which is consistent and reasonably long. By the way, you can download the slides from here: Autoconfig customization & best practices (PDF).

The UKOUG Conference has given me many more ideas of what to look at, so stay tuned for some more goodies about the E-Business Suite.